In any network, caching plays an important role. If the available content in the network were small, every node/router in the network could have stored all the content and this would have led to the best possible performance.
It is not possible to store all the content on every node/router. Hence, the nodes/routers must store only those contents which help these devices to serve the requests arriving from the users directly connected to them i.e., improving the local cache hits.
However, such an approach of maximizing local cache hits does not necessarily lead to an optimal performance of the network i.e., maximizing of total cache hits in the network. Hence, a collaborative approach with neighbors for cache sharing may lead to a better resource utilization and system performance.
Although various network architectures proposed in the literature for Information Centric Networking (ICN) are different from each other in their operations, they all address at least two primary challenges of ICN a) Naming: naming schemes should be efficient as well as scalable to handle massive growth of contents/data. b) Caching: in ICN routers are enabled to cache the contents passing through them. Due to limited available storage memory, it is not possible to store all the contents in the caches of these routers. Hence these caches need to replace content using various standalone caching policies. Existing standalone policies which are in use include Least Recently Used (LRU), Least Frequently Used (LFU), and Universal Caching (UC) etc.
Further, most of the existing standalone ICN caching schemes focus on individual cache routers where each router intends to maximize its cache usage by storing high demand content. Many a times some of the router caches may be underutilized by storing relatively low demand contents while other routers may get over utilized and may be forced to drop high demand content.
The existing standalone caching policies have characterizing metrics based on which caching of the new content and content replacement is performed. For Example Characterizing Metric (CM) ensures that the cache hit for a router is maximized, however this does not ensure that the overall cache hit of the system is maximized. There may be routers in the network which are not very frequently accessed and hence may offer better opportunities for data to be cached in their respective caches. The prior art does not focus on the problem of optimized cache utilization in a network architecture giving consideration to overall network utility and the same is a challenge in the technical domain.